Java’s twenty years old now — next year Duke can have Irish Coffee! Seriously, though, in that time there’s been a lot of changes to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). What once was true may no longer be the case. In digging into an issue I discovered a nice feature of the JVM which enables …

I recently discovered a really interesting tool for producing videos of screen captures, optionally with webcam inserts. It’s called Open Broadcaster Software and it works on Linux, Windows, and there is a beta version for Apple OSX. It seems that it was originally intended for streaming to websites, but it has a lot more features …

I was in training last week — rather than a printed text, we were provided with a PDF of the slides. PDF files are not the easiest thing to annotate without special software and, well, Adobe Acrobat isn’t precisely cheap. I was very pleased to find Tracker Software’s PDF-XChange Editor. There is both a free …

Almost ashamed to admit I did this, yet it’s still kinda cool. I use awk for a lot of commandline parsing; I learned it back in 1989…. before perl was much of a thing. For some problems, awk “just works”. So I was wanting to count the number of instances of ‘A’ in a collection …

I really like that go can produce static executables which do not require any dynamic libraries; this is especially useful for sysadmin tools. Metrix is one such tool — it is a single executable which is able to gather a variety of metrics and send them to different aggregators (by default it is sent to …

The following is fixing the wrong problem, but often technology is easier than people problems. $WORK removed the ability to use plugins with Chrome without having to go through a bureaucratic process lasting weeks. One tool I’ve found useful is the ability to copy the title and link of a page to the clipboard and …

I’ve been working with Docker a good bit and have updated my list of tools. Here’s a quick dump of where I am in the design of the infrastructure. collectd will be used to monitor cgroup statistics. This necessitates compiling all or part of collectd — the current packages do not contain the cgroup plugin. …

Are you limited in what software you can use at work? This article details how to have a web based tool suite for mysql. It currently has the following tools: AjaxMyTop — a php implementation of mytop (think top for mysql) which runs in a browser. rbdb — a phpmyadmin work-alike in progress. It’s the …